Haunting Energies in the Arabic NovelOil, Ecology and the Spectral

Explores an environmental reading of spectres within the Arabic novel

• Constructs a body of ecologically experimental anti-epics from the 1970s and the 1980s, bringing together authors typically associated with environmental thinking with those who have primarily been read through other lenses
• Suggests new ways of reading the Arabic novel’s intertextual relationship to premodern heritage
• Engages with key works by Al-Tayyib Salih, ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, Ibrahim al-Kuni and Salim Barakat
• Proposes an ecological philosophy rooted in Islamically inflected understandings of the unseen and apocalypse at work in the present
• Suggests new comparative possibilities for the Arabic novel, based in the connecting material and spectral force of pipelines, pollution, climate change and high modernist infrastructure

Demons, jinn, doubles and phantoms populate the Arabic novel, particularly as it turns to transforming, turbulent ecological spaces. From the 1960s, 70s and 80s, literary visions of unbearable heat and fragile, collapsing lands prefigure our current crisis. This book revisits key foundational works of modern Arabic fiction, arguing for the ecological uncanniness of their literary experimentation.

Emphasising the shaping force of dams, road building, oil extraction and climate change, Haunting Energies forges new comparative paradigms for the Arabic novel, connected by way of rivers, pipelines and hydrological schemes.